In this episode, Alex, a Romanian developer, tells the tale of
how he and his friends grew their small side project into a $17,000
a month business. In the beginning, they were coding in a
Starbucks. Now their team has grown, they've sponsored 20
hackathons around the world, and business is booming. Here's their
story.

In 2014, my friends and I set out to build the best possible web
design tools. We built UI kits, Admin Dashboards, Templates, and
Plugins. We’ve always tried to create products that are helpful in
the development process, and that we ourselves would use for
building websites for clients.

From a revenue’s perspective, if we don’t take into
consideration the Black Friday sales (which doubled the amount that
we made in November 2016), we are grossing around $22,000 per
month. Part of that goes toward paying our affiliates’ commissions,
collected VAT, payment vendors’ taxes, and other expenses. We end
up netting around $17,000 each month.

In this case study, I’ll share exactly how we built our products
and grew our business. You’ll hear all about:

What motivated us to start our startup, Creative Tim, and how we
built our initial product

How we got our first users

Marketing strategies we used to grow

How our business model works

The story behind our revenue sources

Biggest lessons we’ve learned so far

1. What motivated us to get started with Creative Tim and how we
built the initial product

We started out as a two-person agency in Romania with no funding
from third parties. We didn’t have enough cash to rent an
office — even desks at a co-working space —so we just worked out of
a Starbucks. We were barely able to pay our daily living expenses
by doing work for clients.

Creative Tim was a side project that we thought would come in
handy to web developers like ourselves. We noticed that we were
always “reinventing the wheel” when working with clients, and
creating the same items over and over again for their websites. So
we wanted to create a few standard components, like login and
register modals, calendars, wizards, headers, and footers.

Over the span of a few months, we dedicated our time to
implementing the platform and a few freebies (alongside the agency
work). In the beginning, we didn’t have any Twitter followers,
Facebook fans, or email list subscribers. We posted a lot of stuff
about our freebies on various design forums and we used the “stalk
web developers on Twitter” technique to spread the word about our
products.

2. How we got our first users

At first, nobody really understood what we wanted to do. They
didn’t understand the value we could provide by helping them
improve their businesses. We decided that it would be better to
create a more complex product that would help people understand
what we were doing 🤔

We launched the Get Shit Done Kit, a UI Kit based on Bootstrap.
It was featured on Designer News, and it was quite popular. We got
over 11,000 users from that source, which was a huge spike for our
business.

Then two weeks later our startup was featured on Product Hunt.
That gave us another spike with over 5,000 users. After that, the
situation was stable, and we graduated from 0 users/week to a
consistent 2,000 to 3,000 users/week.

A couple of months later, motivated by the success of free Get
Shit Done Kit, we released Get Shit Done Kit PRO the premium
version of GSDK, with more components and ready-to-use example
pages.

Initially, we only made a few sales. The product was generating
about $200/week, which was not nearly enough to sustain our
business. At the same time we were working on a web project for one
of our clients.

Then in December, we got published on Bootstrap Expo, the most
popular gallery for showcasing websites created with Bootstrap.
This was another important spike for our business. Since all of the
people who go to Bootstrap Expo for inspiration already know
Bootstrap or have previously worked with it, they were the perfect
audience for our business.

Later, we discovered that getting traffic on your website is not
enough to create a long term relationship with your users, and most
of them forgot all about us after their first interaction. We did
some research and discovered what most marketers probably already
know: people forget things that they aren’t reminded of. Then we
implemented the “Remember us email system” following the rules from
the forgetting curve.

We wanted to give our users a reminder that we still existed and
that we’re a valuable resource for their projects or their clients’
projects.

Currently, we send emails at the following schedule:

After 3 days from their first download, we send an email with
other recommended products.

On day 10 we send an email requesting feedback and asking if
they need help.

On day 15 we remind them that they can upgrade to PRO.

On day 30 we ask them again for feedback and offer to promote
something they’ve built in our gallery and social media.

We send a final reminder on day 60.

3. Marketing strategies we used to grow

Most of our marketing strategies consisted of submitting our
content to different communities like Reddit, Product Hunt,
Designer News, Hacker News, and GitHub. Some important subreddits
that work well in our area include /r/web_design, /r/html5,
/r/frontend, and /r/webdev.

We also paid between $100–200 for newsletter campaigns a couple
of times. Even though the ROI ratio matched the amount we invested,
the campaigns did not meet the expectations. (Maybe this was just
in our case, that wasn’t profitable and it works better for
others.)

Then we paid $400 for Get Shit Done Kit PRO to appear in the
Sidebar.io newsletter, a curated list of the 5 best design links
made by Sacha Greif. This was a very rewarding newsletter for us,
generating about $1,500 in sales.

Then we purchased the “Review + Newsletter” package ($550) from
eWebDesign. There were about 5,000 users who participated in the
giveaway, and the total sales amounted $2,800.

We also thought about different places where we could find web
developers who could use our products, and we realized that
hackathons were exactly what we needed.

Presenting how our tools can help during the Hackathon

Subsequently we started talking to people that were organizing
hackathons to offer them free licenses for our “premium products.”
We sponsored over 20 hackathons in different cities around the
world (you can check them here).

All the developers were happy to get free licenses, which made
us happy that we could help them create better projects faster and
they also found out who we are, so a win-win situation.

Critically, being physically present at some of the hackathons
also gave us a lot of information about how the developers were
using our products and how we could improve them in order to make
them more user-friendly.

In March 2015, we finished the agency’s contracts and we
switched from “Agency mode” to “Startup mode.” With some revenue in
the bank and a few monthly sales, our team moved to working full
time for our startup. As we put everything together and constantly
launched new products, our sources of traffic and revenue grew.

4. How the business model works

We realized that the best business model for Creative Tim was
freemium: we create high quality freebies that help web developers
build great websites, then release the PRO versions for those
freebies, which contain more elements, sections, plugins, and
example pages.

At this moment, we have 8 premium products, each of which have
their own freebies. Their prices range from $19 to $599, depending
on the license and archive type (HTML, HTML + PSD, HTML + Sketch).
The freebies appear everywhere on different communities, blog
posts, newsletters, and social websites — and they are driving all
of our traffic.

Our business model: create high quality freebies that help web
developers build great websites, then release the PRO versions for
those freebies which contain more elements. 👌🏼

The basic idea is that those freebies are always appearing on
top 10 lists in these big communities. Each post that’s in the top
10 (depending on how big is the community) gives us between 1,000
and 15,000 targeted users in one day. You can imagine how much that
would cost if you wanted to do a regular targeted marketing
campaign. 😮

Here we have the regular sales that are done on our website,
which are worth about 24% of our overall sales. This doesn’t
include the Big Bundle.

What is this Big Bundle, and how did we create it? We noticed
that some of our users were downloading all our free products.
(When I say all, I literally mean all of them in about 2–3 minutes
after they have created an account.) We also noticed that some of
our clients were purchasing all the products that were premium.

So we decided to test a new product called the “Big Bundle”
which gives you access to all our products with huge discounts
(over 60%). This big package was getting around 6–8 purchases per
month. Since the prices for this Big Bundle is $299 (instead of
$500) for the personal license and $669 (instead of $2,127) for the
developer license, it’s a good source of revenue and a great deal
for the web designers and agencies who are using our products for
multiple clients. It’s a win-win situation.

Affiliates Sales

We’ve created an affiliate network, and our affiliates are very
happy because they get 50% to themselves from each transaction. For
example, one of our most important affiliations is done through a
very popular GitHub Repo: Bootstrap Material Design (17,000+ stars
on GitHub). Currently, affiliates account for around 25% of our
overall revenue.

Organic Search (SEO)

We saw that we were also getting around 22% of our revenue from
SEO. So we decided to invest more in SEO, we brought on an SEO
consultant, whom we pay around $500/month to improve our products’
ranks in Google.

Other revenue

The remainder of our monthly revenue comes from Facebook,
Twitter, and our newsletter. Here’s how our revenue has evolved
over time, along with some historically important moments, so you
can understand why it has grown in some months:

6. The biggest lessons we’ve learned so far

It sounds cliché, but having a great product is crucial.

A lot of founders really struggle trying to market and sell
something that people don’t want or don’t need. If your product is
crap, there is no marketing strategy — and no source of
investment — that can keep it alive for long.

At the moment, our products are used by over 134,000 web
developers around the world. We have people from Microsoft,
Ubisoft, Vodafone, Orange, Harvard University, Stanford University,
and governmental institutions downloading and using them as
different internal tools, and we’ve sponsored more than 20 global
hackathons from 14 countries.

Don’t look to be the next Facebook. Try to solve a real problem
instead.

Every step in our development seemed like the natural thing to
do at the time. Looking back at our evolution, we wouldn’t change
anything. But with all we’ve learned, we could definitely do
everything faster the second time around.

We’ve always created and improved our products based on our
customers’ feedback, and that is the best way to develop a
business. It doesn’t matter what you personally like — you need to
make sure you solve a real problem for a real customer.

Read, read, read.

In the past three years, I’ve read more than I’d read in my
entire life, and this makes me feel great. Here are some of my
favorite books, which I recommend to everybody:

I really do think that the secret weapon is to deliver great
products combined with a great user experience and a great customer
support.

The best decision that we made was to put our customer in the
first row, and make sure that they were receiving a great UI
kit/Dashboard that really solved their problems. That guided us
through the whole journey. Our secret weapon is that we deliver
great products combined with a great user experience and great
customer support.

Everything is possible.

We are living in a world where anybody can become anything they
want as long as they want to invest the amount of time that is
needed. I’m saying time, and not money, because we all have time. I
want to recommend two books that talk about this: Karaoke
Capitalism by Jonas Ridderstråle and Kjell Nordstrom, and Zero to
One by Peter Thiel (a PayPal co-founder).

At this point, there are no limits. You can go anywhere on the
planet and you can talk with whomever you want just by contacting
them through social media. Today an ordinary person can achieve
more influence than the president of a small country. Think of
those Instagram accounts with millions of followers. If I — a
regular guy from Romania — can build a profitable business in 2.5
years that is making 60x my country’s monthly minimum monthly wage,
then boy, just about anything is possible.

About the Podcast

The official podcast of the freeCodeCamp open source community.
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